Blog

2nd November, 2020

If there’s ever been a year when organisations have needed to stop and think again about their digital strategy, it’s been this one. As we head into the tail end of the year, we’ve all become used to meeting our colleagues and clients over Zoom or Teams – but what about our corporate digital strategy?

This year, our partners at Proactis have put together their own digital offering with their free, three-day online event, Proactis ReThink ‘20, running from 10^th – 12^th November. Usually held as a physical event in London, of course this year that’s not been possible. But the team have put together a fantastic virtual programme, packed full of ideas and insights to challenge your existing strategy and understand why the ability to be agile and change direction quickly – underpinned by technology – is critical during uncertain times; and why Finance and Procurement must ‘unite’ to deliver great bottom-line value and help-future proof their organisations.

With the prospect of at least another few months of restrictions in the UK, the patterns of work that we have had to adjust to seem set to stay with us well into next year. The good news is that at this point, most organisations already have a good handle on how to manage business continuity remotely. But with the end of the furlough scheme (now extended until April) some will find themselves out of work, and the company with a gap where once there was a person, or people.

We've all worked with, for or alongside those people who've struggled to remember the names of fellow colleagues, can't remember who has children and only care about KPIs, and not who has delivered what to the team. But working in the wake of Covid-19 has driven the need for a better understanding of the people we work alongside and for. With the sudden disruption to teams and departments, knowing how people operate became just as important to business continuity as the systems they manage. Being a great leader means understanding more about the people within our organisations than ever before. For some people, home environments became work environments for the first time, so being sympathetic to differences became and remains, imperative.

Before you can get started on any project, you need to believe that the information that’s being used to build it on is accurate. In a heavily manual or disjointed organisation, metrics that accurately measure performance are hard to come by. If the business and the team lose faith in the project because of a lack of visibility and control of the data, the resulting inertia will scuttle the project before it’s even begun.